Science Education Alliance

The Science Education Alliance (SEA) works with hundreds of college and university faculty members around the country to engage thousands of undergraduate students each year in authentic scientific discovery early in their academic careers.

Join the SEA

To join the program and begin offering the SEA-PHAGES course in the 2019-2020 academic year, apply by Oct 31, 2018

The Science Education Alliance (SEA) provides faculty members at colleges and universities with opportunities to engage students in research-based curricula early in their academic careers. By doing so, SEA teaches students how to approach scientific problems creatively and critically and prepares them for advanced research opportunities later in their academic careers.

SEA advances science education on a national scale by supporting faculty members in implementing course-based research experiences at their institutions. This practice establishes cohorts of students, educators, and institutions that are connected and have the ability to collaborate nationally.

SEA currently is offering colleges and universities the opportunity to participate in the Phage Hunters Advancing Genomic and Evolutionary Science (SEA-PHAGES) program, which is a national research-based laboratory course aimed at early-career science students. Students from participating colleges and universities isolate and characterize bacteriophages from local environments, annotate the phage genomes, and submit the annotated sequences to the National Center for Biotechnology Information GenBank database. At the end of the year, student and faculty representatives from participating schools attend the SEA Symposium, a scientific meeting at which participants share and discuss their discoveries. In 2016–17 more than 4,100 mostly first-year students from 100 different colleges and universities took part. The SEA-PHAGES program has generated more than 20 peer-reviewed publications to date.

Students acquire early, meaningful research experiences that make them feel a part of the scientific community. They are more productive, competitive, and prepared for advanced research opportunities and graduate school later in their undergraduate careers.

The SEA-PHAGES course is open to all colleges and universities. Selection is primarily based on the readiness and commitment of the applying institution to offer and sustain the course beyond the first year.

Applications to join SEA and offer the SEA-PHAGES course are solicited the fall prior to each academic year.

For more information, see the application materials in the Downloads box.

SEA-PHAGES in Images

Phage Discovery

Bioinformatics

Second term: Students annotate and analyze the genomes through bioinformatics.

Image from Graham Hatfull et. al.

The Symposium

Participating SEA students and faculty gather to share and discuss scientific data generated during and beyond the PHAGES course.

Image by Matt Staley

The Student Perspective

"When I take a moment to pause and think, about Phage Hunting and life in general, I find myself amazed. I’ve only been on this earth for eighteen short years, and yet I’m doing actual research." Allyson Roberts, Johns Hopkins University